Its About Time: Nicolas Ghesquire and Andrew Bolton Reveal Details of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Costume Institute Spring Exhibition – Vogue

As Nicolas Ghesquire took to the podium at this mornings press conference for the 2020 spring exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Costume Institute, his backdrop was the enormous clock that overlooks the Seine from the Muse dOrsay. Louis Vuittons artistic director of womens collections is acting as cochair of this years Met gala, celebrating the show About Time: Fashion and Duration, and as the minute hand of the clock behind him crept forward, he explained why that theme feels particularly appropriate. He said: It got me thinking about fashions intimate link to the notion of time, not just because fashion is the perfect mirror of the moment but because it plays such a significant role in shaping our future. At Louis Vuitton, fashion and time have been in constant dialogue for over 150 years. And the rapport between those two elements remains fundamental to my work. I have always looked to marry silhouettes, techniques, memories, and impressions from the past with the latest technology to create fashion for today that speaks to the future.

The man calibrating every last detail of the About Time show is Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge at the Costume Institute. Bolton replaced Ghesquire in front of the dOrsay clock to disassemble the mechanics of thought behind the exhibition that will open with the Met gala on May 4. He said: Fashion teaches us to tell time differently. It shows us that there is more to time than what you can count on the fingers of your hands or on the hands of your clock.

This exhibitions starting point, he expanded, is that this year is the 150th anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a temporal landmark being celebrated across the museum. The anniversary led to a consideration of the nature of longevity in fashionan art form whose ever-shifting, ephemeral nature makes it an extremely accurate cultural timepieceas seen through the watch face of the institutes collection. Bolton observed: We wanted to rethink our collection through a concept that reflected the fashion zeitgeist, one that we felt was very timely and topical In recent years, time has dominated discussions within the fashion community. These talks are centered around the accelerated production, circulation, and consumption of fashion in the digitally synchronized world, the 21st century. Unquestionably companies have benefited from this sped-up, around-the-clock temporality of digital capitalism, but designers have often been creatively constrained by its 24/7, continuous functioning. So we thought it might be an opportune moment to explore the temporal character of fashion from a historical perspective.

Bolton explained that the exhibition, which he is designing in collaboration with Es Devlin, will itself be a clock. This clock will be constructed of two sets of 60 pieces of fashion that act as markers of moments spanning 1870 to now. It will also have two functions: The first will tell time in a chronologically linear order, and the second will be a kind of time-travel chronometer that allows the visitor to hop across moments in time between 1870 and now when fashions helix circularity (what comes around goes around) has resulted in intersections (or interruptions) in the fabric of our perception of the present through clothing. Like any precision timepiece, the complications of its movement will result in a conveniently readable face.

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Its About Time: Nicolas Ghesquire and Andrew Bolton Reveal Details of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Costume Institute Spring Exhibition - Vogue